Wednesday, 24 February 2016

Britain is no longer a country for and says "Farewell" to an old cinematographer called Douglas Slocombe

Douglas, who has died at the age of 103, made 84 feature films over 47 years and leaves gentlemen and women of a certain age in Britain, remembering the enjoyment his black and and white Ealing comedies gave them when they were boys and girls in the 1940's and '50s and taking their own kids to enjoy his 'Indiana Jones' films in the 1980s.

What you possibly didn't know about Douglas, that he :

* was born in London, just before the outbreak of the First World War in 1913 'Daily Herald' and at the age of 10, met James Joyce when the novelist dropped in to his parents with a signed pre-publication copy of 'Ulysses'. and was brought
up and went to school in Paris, where his father worked as foreign correspondent for the * had a father who, as a journalist, had interviewed Hitler and Mussolini and been instrumental in freeing Gandhi from prison and in his book,'Paris in Profile' had written poetically of the 'Louvre crouches like a tiger among the trees' and followed Dad into the profession when, after leaving university, he joined British United Press in Fleet Street in the mid 1930s.

* began his career as a photojournalist and later said : "I had fallen in love with photography and was making a living doing photographic features for publications such as Picture Post, Paris Match and Life magazine. But in 1939 I saw a huge headline which I think was in the Sunday Express. It said: 'Danzig - Danger Point of Europe.' I packed up my Leica, got on a train and went."

* was present and endangered himself with his newsreel camera at a meeting of the Nazi Popaganda Minister : "The Eyemo was heavy and could be noisy. Once I was in an auditorium filming a speech made by Goebbels, when suddenly it decided to emit a huge snarling sound. Goebbels froze and hundreds of uniformed Brownshirts turned and glared at me in anger. It was not a comfortable moment."

* later said that he found himself "right in the middle of an absolute hotbed of Nazi intrigue. I remember taking photographs as the local Gauleiter harangued huge crowds of Germans in the evenings with a big swastika flag in the background and photographed a synagogue which the Nazis had hung a huge banner on. It said 'Komm lieber Mai und mache von Juden uns jetzt frei' - come the lovely month of May, we shall be free of the Jews."

* one evening soon afterwards, noticed the sky over Danzig had turned red from a synagogue on fire and while filming"was arrested by the Gestapo and thrown into a cell but the next morning they let me go. After that the city's Polish authorities, who had been helping get my film out, thought it would be a good idea for me to leave."* was in Warsaw when the German Airforce attacked and later said : "I'd already filmed with the cavalry and knew they were magnificent horsemen. But now we were at a machine-gun post with a WW1 gun screwed to a tree stump guarding a bridge. There were German planes overhead and German artillery heading across Poland it was obvious the Poles were about to be outgunned."* returning to Britain, worked for the Ministry of Information and at the age of 30 was shooting newsreels and propaganda films and divided his time between the Fleet Air Arm and Ealing Studios, with 'The Big Blockade' with footage shot on Atlantic convoys and made his debut as a full-fledged cinematographer in 'Dead of Night' with Michael Redgrave in 1945. :

* in 1966 while filming 'The Blue Max' with things not going well between George Peppard and Ursula after the bed scene, she leapt out of bed as naked as the day she was born and stormed off the set saying : “And the bastarddidn’t even get an erection!!” to which Douglas replied, “We all did, Ursula !"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5uRV91TJbQ

* at the age of 64, became favourite of director, Steven Spielberg and was responsible for the acclaimed and technically complex photography on his blockbuster, 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' in 1977 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Dacfll4bVU&t=0m16s

* while shooting 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' in 1981, was noted for never having to use a light meter, that almost indispensable tool for most cinematographers, with Harrison Ford later saying that he "just held up his hand and observed the shadow his thumb made on the palm" and in his cinematography, with his use of vibrant colour, managed to be both modern and evocative of the 1930s past of Dr. Jones. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aADExWV1bsM&t=1m23s

* was celebrated for his wit, modesty, generosity and calming influence on the set.

* spent his last years by the River Thames in London with his daughter, where, sadly, his near-blindness meant he no longer saw a river which long ago featured in black-and-white classics he shot, such as 'Hue and Cry' and 'The Man in the White Suit'.

* in 2009 when he was 96, saw leading figures in British and American cinema take part in a BAFTA tribute to him with Vanessa Redgrave speaking of the "wonderful way" he shot her father as a mad ventriloquist in 'Dead of Night' and the flattering way he lit her and Jane Fonda in Fred Zinnemann's 'Julia' and Glenda Jackson recalled an overhead shot in which he photographed her stark naked on the floor of a rocking Russian train in Ken Russell's 'The Music Lovers', when after a third take, he dropped on top of her from the luggage rack and said, in his charming stammer: "I'm a m-married m-man."